Tag Archives: Argentina

Former president and 11 others face charges they helped Iranians hide role in 1994 terror attack on Jewish center that killed 85

Former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner will face trial on charges she covered up the role of Iranians in a 1994 terrorist bombing at a Jewish center in Argentina’s capital, judicial authorities announced Monday.

Eleven other former officials and people close to Kirchner’s government will also be tried on charges of cover-up and abuse of power, Federal Judge Claudio Bonadio said in a ruling released by Argentina’s official CIJ Judicial Information Center.

The trial date has not been set.

So far, four of the accused have been detained. In December, Bonadio asked lawmakers to remove Kirchner’s immunity from prosecution, which she gained last year when she was sworn in as a senator. Legislators have not acted on the request. The immunity protects her from being arrested, but she can still be tried.

Kirchner, who was president in 2007-2015, denies any wrongdoing or involvement in any cover-up involving Argentina’s worst terror attack. The 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association center in Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded hundreds. Iran denies any involvement.

The judge backed an assertion against Kirchner made on January 14, 2015, by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who was investigating the case. Nisman said the 2013 agreement that Kirchner’s government made with Iran in exchange for favorable deals on oil and other goods ensured that Iranian officials involved in the attack would escape prosecution.

Nisman was found dead in his apartment with a bullet wound in his right temple four days later. His case remains unsolved. But last year, an investigation by Argentina’s border police agency concluded that Nisman was murdered, contradicting earlier official findings that Nisman likely killed himself.

(Thousands of Argentinians protest on February 18, 2015 in Buenos Aires, with signs demanding “Truth and Justice,” on the one-month anniversary of the murder of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman. Nisman was murdered by unknown assailants one day before he was officially to present allegations of treason against then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. )

If efforts to expose Iran’s and Hezbollah’s roles in the Argentinean bombings are successful, the information will elucidate for regional leaders the dark side of Iran’s ties to sub-state terrorist groups to increase even further its influence in Latin America.

For decades, Iran has seemingly been employing both normative diplomatic ties and criminal links to export its Islamic revolution to the Western Hemisphere. By using similar methods of subversion, Iran appears already to have penetrated other Latin American nations, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and some island countries in the Caribbean.

Iran’s activities in Latin America are a direct challenge to U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere. Iran, it seems, wants to replace the U.S. as the power ally of Latin American countries.

While Iran’s nuclear, ballistic missile, and expansionist policies in the Middle East are well known, most of the Islamic Republic’s operations in Latin America appear to have been proceeding underway, below the radar, for several decades.

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Declassified Argentine intelligence reports also clearly show that Hezbollah had carried out a previous bombing, in 1992, of the Israeli Embassy — an attack in which 29 were killed and around 200 wounded.

Last month marked the third anniversary of the murder of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who claimed to have evidence that would expose the role Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in obscuring Iran’s alleged responsibility for the attack. Nisman had been leading an investigation into both Iran’s potential role in the AMIA bombing and its possible cover-up by Kirchner.

Initially, Nisman’s death seemed to doom any chance that those who had committed this act of terror would ever be prosecuted. Argentinian protestors, however, questioned initial reports that he had committed suicide and demandedthat his death be investigated.

Internet streaming giant Netflix has reportedly begun production in Buenos Aires on a documentary miniseries probing the January 2015 murder of Alberto Nisman – the federal prosecutor who spent more than a decade investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the Argentine capital, and then later exposed the role of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her colleagues in a cover-up of Iran’s responsibility for the atrocity.

Reports in the Argentine press on Monday said that Catalan production company JWP had been commissioned by Netflix to produce the series. Founded by the British documentary film director Justin Webster, the company has produced award-winning documentaries on Spain and Latin America, including a film about the celebrated Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and another on the Basque terrorist group ETA.

Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment on January 18, 2015, hours before he was due to deliver a complaint to the Argentine Congress that charged Kirchner, former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, and several key aides and cabinet officials with having negotiated a pact with Iran that involved the cancelation of six “Red Notices” — international arrest warrants issued by global law enforcement agency Interpol — for the Iranian officials wanted in connection with the AMIA bombing. The pact was voided by Argentina’s Supreme Court following Kirchner’s electoral defeat by current President Mauricio Macri in November 2015.

While the Kirchner government’s initial efforts to portray Nisman’s murder as a suicide have been completely discredited by official forensic analysis of the crime scene, the exact reason behind his murder and the identity of his killers is yet to be revealed. According to Argentine news outlet Diario 26, the producers of the Netflix series are hoping to obtain interviews with Kirchner herself; Nisman’s former assistant Diego Lagomarsino, who was indicted in December 2017 as an accomplice to the murder; and with a number of the key officials who claimed that Nisman took his own life.

Often described as the “86th victim” of the AMIA bombing, Nisman took over the case in 2005 after the previous corrupted investigation into the attack collapsed. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more wounded after a truck packed with explosives drove into the AMIA building in downtown Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994 in what remains the worst terrorist attack on Latin American soil.

Nisman was found dead after accusing former president of concealing Iran’s role in 1994 Jewish center bombing

Resolutions urging for a “full and just investigation” into the death of the Jewish-Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman were introduced in the US House of Representatives and the Senate on Friday, reported the Times of Israel.

Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican and Democrat Ted Deutch, initiated the resolution alongside a companion motion introduced in the Senate by Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio.

The Argentine prosecutor who was found deceased shortly after accusing a former president of covering up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center, did not die by suicide – rather, he was murdered, a federal judge Julian Ercolini said last month.

Nisman was found dead in January 2015 with a gunshot wound to his head days after filing a report accusing Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other figures close to the government. He accused them of protecting high-ranking Iranian officials from prosecution over the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Charities Federation (AMIA) in exchange for oil and other trade benefits.

An Argentine court and western intelligence services support Nisman’s claims that Iran and Hezbollah were involved, however Tehran has vociferously denied the claims.

It is difficult to expose the truth and seek justice when there is no trust in the legal system and there’s a lack of judicial independence facilitating impunity. Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman fought against all odds and was murdered in his quest for justice.

In 1997, Nisman became involved in the investigation of the 1994 AMIA bombing—the deadliest terror attack in the Western Hemisphere prior to 9/11—and worked under two other prosecutors who were already handling the case. The trial began years later, but the investigation, headed by federal judge Juan Jose Galeano, was plagued with irregularities: Galeano bribed a suspect with $400,000 to testify against other officers under investigation, former president Carlos Menem endorsed that bribe in what appeared to be an attempt to humiliate the governor of Buenos Aires who was a political adversary, and the role of the local police facilitating the attack was overlooked. The absurdities in the case continued and the AMIA case became one of the most high profile investigations in modern Argentinian history.

The case collapsed, and its handling became a national embarrassment. But, a year later, Nisman was appointed to lead a new AMIA investigative unit and by 2007 he charged several top Iranian officials, including former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani as well as Hezbollah leaders, for carrying out the attack. Interpol issued “red notices,” which are similar to arrest warrants. Iran, not surprisingly, refused to extradite the suspects, denied its role in the terror attack, and ignored Interpol’s red notices.

More than two decades after the deadliest bombing in Argentina’s history, the details of the unresolved massacre are only becoming more mysterious.

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead just hours before he was set to testify against former President Cristina Fernández in early 2015. His death, which triggered an avalanche of conspiracy theories, was initially labeled a suicide. But a federal judge ruled this week that Nisman was murdered.

“The death of Prosecutor Nisman was not a suicide, and was brought about by a third party and in a painful manner,” said federal judge Julián Ercolini.

Nisman had been leading the investigation into the attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured more than 300 in 1994. He was appointed to lead the terror probe in 2004, when few details in the case had been established.

After more than a decade of investigation, Nisman accused Fernández in January 2015 of covering up Iran’s alleged involvement in the bombing in a suspected attempt to boost trade with Tehran. He was discovered dead in his apartment from a gunshot wound to the head days later.

Bonadio has requested that her immunity be lifted. But Fernandez’s local and regional allies say she is being targeted in a “media and judicial hunt.” Bonadio has for years been under investigation for alleged corruption crimes including money laundering.

In an op-ed published in The New York Times on Monday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, argued that the treason charge sought against Argentinian ex-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and a number of her top aides, vindicates the late Alberto Nisman’s investigation into the 1994 AMIA bombing.

Last Thursday, Argentinians woke up to a political earthquake as the federal judge Claudio Bonadio, who investigated Kirchner’s government role in covering up Iran’s involvement in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center, indicted Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, as well as other government officials. Dubowitz and Dershowitz, respectively the CEO and senior vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained that Kirchner was being charged with “nothing less than covering up Iran’s role in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the Americas before Sept. 11.”

Charges against Kirchner include “treason against the homeland” and she could spend 25 years in jail. The judge has asked lawmakers in the Senate to strip away her parliamentary immunity so that she can be arrested and tried.

From 2004 to 2015, Dubowitz and Dershowitz recounted, Alberto Nisman investigated the AMIA terror attack and concluded that Iran planned it, and that later, the Kirchner government sought to “whitewash” the Islamic Republic’s role in the attack by establishing a joint “truth commission” that would allow them to identify the culprits of the bombing. The memorandum of understanding between Argentina and Iran would also remove Interpol’s red notices (similar to arrest warrants) against the perpetrators.

Kirchner’s government, with the help of Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, established backchannels by way of Syria, to negotiate the secret pact.

Nisman was found dead in his apartment the day before he was due to testify before Congress about his findings in January 2015.

“In a normal democracy,” the experts noted, “investigating the murders of a man like Alberto Nisman would be a top priority.” It wasn’t until December 2015, when Mauricio Macri, the newly elected president, ordered an independent investigation.